The Battle Between Good and Evil on Navarone

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Mallory (Gregory Peck): Are you sure it will work?

Corp. Miller (David Niven): There's no guarantee, but the theory's perfectly feasible.

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No one would ever conclude that I am a fan of war movies. I grew up that way. My parents were decidedly antiwar when I was growing up, and I grew up believing as they did.

As an adult, I have amended my position, acknowledging that sometimes it is necessary to fight, but that doesn't mean that my attitude about war movies has changed much. I've never really been much for splashy special effects and explosions. I'm a writer. I like dialogue. Lots of it.

I do like some war movies, just as I do like some westerns and some love stories. Just not all of them. Not even most of them.

My overriding preference when it comes to movies of any genre is that the movie tell a good story. And that is what "The Guns of Navarone," which premiered on America's movie screens on this day in 1961, did.

If it had been one of those war movies where two sides just begin shooting randomly at each other for no apparent reason other than the fact that they represent two opposing sides in an armed conflict, it wouldn't have interested me. I'll grant you, that is how most wars seem to be fought. Still, I want a story, something that gives the movie context.

"The Guns of Navarone" was a fictional story about World War II, and it was a darn good story.

It was set with a real event as the backdrop — the Dodecanese Campaign, in which the Allied forces sought to capture the Italian–held Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea in 1943, a mission that failed — on a fictional island called Navarone. Specifically, it was based on events surrounding the Battle of Leros, the central event of that campaign. The Italians had installed two powerful guns on the island that controlled the seas, but they were captured by the Germans in the battle.

Using that as the inspiration, Scottish writer Alistair MacLean penned the novel "The Guns of Navarone," in which a group of commandos sets out to destroy the island fortress and liberate more than 1,000 British soldiers.

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Well, that's how it was in real life. In the novel (and the movie it inspired), there were 2,000 British soldiers. The British Navy planned to send in ships to rescue them, but first, those guns had to be neutralized. That's where the commandos came in.

Don't get me wrong. "The Guns of Navarone" had plenty of shooting and explosions — in fact, it won an Oscar for its special effects — but it also had a lot of dialogue that really told the story. (Carl Foreman was nominated for an Oscar for his adapted screenplay, but he lost to "Judgment at Nuremberg.")

Then, along the way, the movie's stars — Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn — kept propelling the commandos forward. Each brought a special qualification to the enterprise. Peck played a spy from New Zealand, talented at what he did but inexperienced as a leader; Niven was an explosives expert, and Quinn was a Greek patriot.

There were breathtakingly dramatic moments as the commando unit made its way to the objective. If you are part of the millennial generation and you've never seen "The Guns of Navarone" before, you may well see similarities between it and "The Lord of the Rings" when you do. The characters and circumstances are different, but the similarities are undeniable. Peck and Niven, in their quest for the guns, are not unlike Frodo and Sam in their journey to Mordor.

And both stories were about the clash between good and evil.

Standing Up to Vigilante Justice in the 19th Century

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Major Tetley (Frank Conroy): This is only slightly any of your business, my friend. Remember that.

Gil Carter (Henry Fonda): Hangin' is any man's business that's around.

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If someone asked me to pick my favorite Henry Fonda movie, that would be a tough assignment for me.

I have admired Fonda for a long time, and I like nearly all of his movies.

But, while his movies are great, the problem with many of them is that they have lost much of their relevance with the passage of time.

Not so director William Wellman's "The Ox–Bow Incident," which premiered 70 years ago today. Its topic is timeless — mob rule and vigilante justice, which, sadly, the human race never seems to outgrow — and, even though it is set in the Old West, it is still more a drama than a western and could have been set in any place at any time.

The setting is all too human — a small town in 19th–century Nevada is plunged into fear when word spreads that a local rancher has been murdered and at least a portion of his livestock may have been stolen. The sheriff is out of town, and his deputy takes it upon himself to form a posse. Fonda and his sidekick, Harry Morgan, are drifters who get swept up in the mania and are enlisted to assist in the pursuit of the "killers."

Before the posse leaves town, a judge instructs its members to bring the suspects back for a trial. He also tells them that the actual creation of the posse by the deputy is illegal. In the dead of night, the posse encounters three strangers, who are unable to verify that their herd was purchased fair and square. The absence of a bill of sale is enough for the mob and its leader, an ex–officer in the Confederate army, to find the men guilty and sentence them to death by hanging.

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Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and a senile old man played by Francis Ford protested that they were innocent, but their pleas fell on mostly deaf ears — and Fonda and Morgan participated in the lynch mob that ended their lives.

But that was decidedly not the end of the story.

After the three men had been hung and the lynch mob returned to town, it was discovered that there had been no murder after all. The three men had been executed for nothing.

Fonda was in his finest "The Grapes of Wrath" Tom Joad mode, at one point telling the Confederate officer (after the officer informed Fonda that the lynchings were "only slightly" his business), "Hangin' is any man's business that's around."

But there are few more elevating moments in American cinema than when Fonda reads aloud the letter written by one of the condemned men (Andrews) to his wife explaining what was happening.

I always thought one of the best touches was how the angle of the camera shot obscured Fonda's eyes with the bill of Morgan's hat as he read the letter. It subtly reminded viewers that justice is blind in America — or, at least, it is supposed to be.

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"My dear wife, Mr. Davies will tell you what's happening here tonight. He's a good man and has done everything he can for me. I suppose there are some other good men here, too, only they don't seem to realize what they're doing. They're the ones I feel sorry for. 'Cause it'll be over for me in a little while, but they'll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just naturally can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin' everybody in the world, 'cause then he's just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody's conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived? I guess that's all I've got to say except kiss the babies for me and God bless you. Your husband, Donald."

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The project was special to Fonda and Wellman — so special that they both agreed to work on lesser studio projects in return for being allowed to make "The Ox–Bow Incident." Fonda, of course, went on to appear in other great films in his career, but for Wellman it was a peak he never reached again.

It is safe to say "The Ox–Bow Incident" wasn't a blockbuster at the box office in 1943. Its budget of $565,000 seems modest by modern standards — but so did its profits.

Thankfully, though, time has been much kinder to "The Ox–Bow Incident" — at least as far as perception is concerned. It is much more likely today to be regarded as one of the great movies of all time.

It was a nominee for Best Picture at the Oscars in 1943 (the last time until 2009 that more than five movies were nominated for that award) and lost out to "Casablanca" — which is a great movie, but I don't think it had the same kind of moral to teach.